Behind The Mask ~ TO JUDGE OR NOT
TO JUDGE
Not long before I
wrote this, something happened in New South Wales
that sent shock-waves through Australia: a six-year-old
boy was so badly beaten by the de-facto husband of
his mother that he sustained brain-damage and died
shortly afterwards. When the mother and her lover
realized what they had done, they concocted a story
that the child had been set-upon by a gang of teenagers
while on the way to the shops with his elder brother;
they even coached the elder brother to corroborate
this lie. But their deception was soon discovered
and they were arrested and charged with murder. Not
surprisingly, this crime provoked outrage in their
community, and indeed all over the country.
We hear of old people being bashed and murdered
for their meager savings, of old ladies being raped
and killed; violent crimes against the very young
and the very old—those least able to defend
themselves—are increasing, and terror spreading.
The cry for the execution of people who
commit such crimes grows louder day-by-day, and it
is hard to imagine how the politicians will continue
to ignore it much longer; any polly who makes it a
point in his next election-campaign is almost sure
to get lots of support.
With horrific crimes like this not infrequent
now, and the judicial and law-enforcement systems
obviously unable to cope, more and more people are
calling for the reintroduction of the death-penalty.
In this article, I would like to look at the controversial
issue of capital-punishment.
It is only within this century that most
Western countries have abolished the death-sentence,
but it is still very much in force in the majority
of other countries for crimes such as murder, drug-smuggling,
treason, espionage, kidnapping and—in some countries—adultery,
rape and prostitution. In countries where law has
been suspended by dictators, people lose their lives
for much lesser crimes, or merely on the whim of those
in power.
Capital-punishment has been meted out for
as long as people have gathered together in organized
groups, when it became clear that certain laws and
standards were necessary for the sake of cohesion
and social harmony; and as communities became more
organized and occasion required it, more laws were
enacted and rulers and judges appointed, with others
being assigned the task of enforcing the laws, and
of bringing to justice those who broke them.
Serial-killings, shoot-out massacres, armed-robbery,
pack-rape, sex-crimes, child-abuse, torture, burglary,
township-violence, aerial-bombardment, smart-bombs,
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons: the list
goes on and on, and paints a very grim picture of
the human race. With our amazing science, technology
and widespread higher-education, we are not, on the
whole, as civilized as we like to think, for a chain
is only as strong as its weakest link, and the chain
seems to be getting weaker and weaker and in imminent
danger of snapping; the forces of law-and-order seem
unable to contain or curb the rising tide of crime
and violence, and many people fear that we are on
the edge of another age of barbarism like that which
engulfed Europe for almost a thousand years after
the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century,
and which we appropriately refer to as The Dark Ages.
Moreover, the forces of law-and-order have lost the
respect and support of vast numbers of people and
become tarnished by the exposé of their faults
and excesses. The world’s richest and most-powerful
country, the USA, is no longer ‘the land of
the free’ but of the fearful, where it is unwise
to go alone on the street at night—or even in
the daytime in some cities! It is still ‘the
home of the brave’, however, because people
have to be brave to go on living there! The Western
social system quite clearly seems to be disintegrating.
The death-penalty has been meted out in
many ways over the ages, from burning, drowning, strangulation,
hanging, poisoning, decapitation, to shooting, gassing,
electrocution, lethal-injection, and so on. Man has
lavished all his ingenuity on devising and using instruments
of torture; the fiendishness of them staggers the
imagination! Legalized mass-murder is called War,
and the most bloody conflict ever—the Second
World War—claimed 50 million lives, and still
we have not learned!
For many centuries until this one, the moral
and legal codes of most Western countries were based
on the Judaeo-Christian Bible, and the savage "eye
for an eye, tooth for a tooth" justice propounded
therein. Thus, sentencing of criminals tended to be
vengeful and punitive rather than educative and corrective.
But even today we have not advanced so far along the
path of reform; many prisons remain universities of
crime, with drugs readily available, where inmates
are brutalized and often become worse than they were
before, and come out with a huge grudge against the
society that took away their freedom and incarcerated
them.
People who oppose capital-punishment call
it barbaric and inhumane, and reduces those who support
and advocate it to the level of those they condemn.
Moreover, they say that innocent people are sometimes
executed on wrongful charges and false evidence, and
that fresh evidence exonerating the executed person
and exposing the fatal mistake sometimes turns up
later, but too late, of course, to bring the innocent
person back to life. Also, they maintain that life
is sacred, and no-one can create it, so no-one has
the right to take it away. But this is something that
those who commit premeditated murder should consider
before taking the lives of others, is it not?
If only we were taught in school from childhood
and helped to understand that our life-span, at most,
is brief, and to be honest and fearless about what
we do, so that when and if confronted about our misdemeanors,
we would not deny them and lie about them, even going
so far as to swear on books regarded as sacred that
we didn’t do them. By denying the wrong we have
done, we become not only miscreants but also liars
and cowards; we are brave enough to do wrong, but
not brave enough to admit it. This is cowardly, and
certainly nothing to admire or be proud of.
Are we still morally and spiritually children
that we can claim credit for our good actions but
deny responsibility for our bad actions or blame them
on temptation or mitigating circumstances? No-one
is perfect and error-free, and to pretend to be is
just another error. We are human, and so have the
limitations of our unenlightened state, though it
is as humans that we may achieve enlightenment, and
should indeed strive to do so. It arises through understanding
ourselves just as we are, rather than as we would
like to be. It means accepting our faults and failings
without trying to gloss over them and being honest
about our mistakes. We all tell lies at times, for
example, not necessarily to deliberately deceive,
but simply because it is often hard not to, and anyone
who claims that he never tells lies is probably lying
right there and then!
We could be taught and shown that it is
human to make mistakes and sometimes give way to our
negative inclinations, but that it is better and more
manly to admit them, honestly and fearlessly and to
accept the consequences thereof, than to cravenly
deny that we did them, and seek to escape the results.
"Yes, I did it", we might say, "I regret
it now, but I did it, and am ready to accept the consequences".
If we could bring ourselves or be brought to this
degree of maturity, we would live much more responsibly
and be more in control of ourselves. So, once again,
we are led back to education: the education-system
is to blame for most of our ills, personal as well
as social. It aims only to make us academically successful
and denies us a moral basis for living; thus, we may
be highly qualified in a particular area, but dishonest,
ruthless and unscrupulous in our dealings with others,
and our education—or rather miseducation—is
largely to blame for this, for providing us with knowledge,
but not showing us that it is to be used for the benefit
of the community we live in, instead of against it
and for self-aggrandizement.
Must we be saints to be honest? Is honesty
beyond the average person? In the Buddhist scriptures
it is stated that a Sotapanna ("Stream-Enterer")—that
is, someone who has reached the first stage of enlightenment
or sainthood—though still capable of committing
bad or unwholesome actions, cannot and will not knowingly
conceal them or pretend that he didn’t do them,
but will honestly and fearlessly admit them—not
in an exhibitionist manner, of course, but as things
to be given up. And if a person of such attainment
can still make errors and do things wrong, we may
derive some consolation and feel that there is still
hope for us.
But if we cannot live like this completely,
it is possible, I am convinced, to create a mental
climate educationally, wherein we would be less afraid
and more willing to ‘own up’ to our misdeeds;
we could be encouraged to be honest and not to be
dishonest, instead of the other way around; by being
realistic about ourselves as humans, we would not
impose impossible standards on ourselves and others,
and this, far from increasing licentiousness, would,
with proper guidance, inspire and give rise to a greater
sense of responsibility and maturity. A lesson in
this might be learned from the attitude shown in the
Netherlands towards the use of ‘soft’
drugs like hashish and marijuana: while not actually
legal, the authorities and general public turn a blind
eye to it, and such drugs are openly sold and smoked
in many coffee-houses. This takes it off the black-market
and removes the morbid fascination of the ‘forbidden-fruit’
aspect of it, with the result that the Netherlands
now has the smallest proportion of people who use
hash and marijuana, and the lowest crime-rate attached
thereto, of any country in the Western world. Compare
this with Australia, where drug-use is on the increase,
and possession of hash and ‘mary-jane’
is a punishable crime, and hidden plantations of ‘grass’
valued at millions are frequently discovered and destroyed.
But how does such stuff—a weed—come to
be so preposterously valued?? To me, it is neither
expensive nor cheap, but simply worthless, as it is
something I don’t need or want. The value is
totally artificially!
Years ago, when I worked in the Manila City
Jail, I was appalled to see young children living
there with their parents. I remember in particular
one little boy of about four (he would now be about
22, if he is still alive), because some of the inmates
had trained him to draw his forefinger across his
throat—to signify throat-cutting—whenever
someone asked him the question: "What are you
in for?" What an education!
From my work in that jail, I learned a number
of lessons, among them being not to think of people
as bad just because they had done bad things. When
I first went there, I used to recoil inwardly when,
upon asking people what they were in for, they said
"Murder". But upon reflection, I came to
see that it is not difficult to kill someone—we
are all capable of it; all we have to do is to become
angry, ‘lose our minds’ for a moment,
pick up something lying nearby, like a knife, bottle
or axe, and hit someone with it, and that person could
easily die. It would then be too late to say: "Oh,
I’m sorry! Don’t die! I didn’t mean
it! Please don’t die!"
I have strayed a bit, I know, from my discussion
of capital punishment (maybe some people will say
I’ve been beating around the bush), but I must
please myself with my writing, too, otherwise I could
never sit down to write, and my meanderings herein
have been both interesting (to me) and enabled me
to touch on various other points and weave them into
a pattern. But let us get back to the main topic,
and look at the arguments for the reintroduction of
the death-penalty for certain serious and cold-blooded
crimes.
Supporters of capital-punishment maintain
that the law favors the criminals over their victims,
who pay twice: once by suffering at the hands of the
criminals, and again through their taxes being used
to pay for the incarceration of the perpetrators of
the crimes. They hold that the punishment should be
made to fit the crime, and that if the punishment
for certain illegal activities is the death-sentence,
and if people insist on committing crimes in full
awareness of what they are doing and the risks involved
(drug-smuggling, for example, which is done for the
sake of potentially-huge profits but which ruins the
lives of people who become addicted), they cannot
reasonably complain if they are caught and punished.
They know the law; they know the risks. They would
rejoice if they succeeded in their venture; they shouldn’t
protest if they fail and are caught, but should accept
it stoically and honestly, for it is of their own
making, and no-one else’s. And whoever believed
the naïve tale told by the two young British
girls who were caught attempting to smuggle heroin
out of Thailand a few years ago? They claimed that
they had met someone in a Bangkok nightclub—a
complete stranger!—who had asked them to carry
something out of Thailand for him. Now, everyone who
visits countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore—and
most other countries nowadays—is warned not
to carry anything for anyone that they are not absolutely
sure of, and upon leaving the country, at the airport,
people are questioned about this, and whether or not
they have packed their own bags. A large quantity
of heroin—more than 20 kgs, if my memory serves
me correctly—was found in the girls’ baggage
at the airport, concealed in containers of talcum-powder,
of all things. They were found guilty of smuggling,
and given sentences of 24 and 18 years in the notorious
‘Bangkok Hilton’ jail, and were lucky,
some think, not to be given the death-sentence. But,
because of behind-the-scenes intergovernmental negotiations,
they were recently freed on an amnesty of the King
of Thailand, and the press-people turned out in swarms
to meet them upon their return to London. From being
treated as criminals, they had become celebrities,
and there was talk of half-a-million pounds sterling
or more for their story! Who says that crime doesn’t
pay?
Freedom is a wonderful thing that we can
have too much of and which many people are obviously
not ready for. Without laws to live by, and without
enforcement of those laws, society would quickly sink
into a state of anarchy and chaos. We are already
in a mess and getting worse, and do not have the luxury
of time needed to educate people and get them to understand
the value of life. If the death-penalty is reintroduced,
and if it is proved beyond reasonable doubt that people
are guilty of crimes carrying the death-sentence—and
in many cases it is clear—the sentence should
be carried out forthwith, rather than prolonging the
suffering of the condemned person by keeping him on
death-row for years. If the authorities waver and
lose their nerve and show unwillingness to carry through
the laws they have enacted, they had better not make
them in the first place, or they will not be taken
seriously.
And what about compassion?, some people
will ask. Compassion is something that the perpetrators
of crime should think about before victimizing others,
and not after they have been caught and found guilty.
Jesus is reported to have said: "Let
he who is without sin cast the first stone",
meaning that no-one is innocent and in a position
to blame others. Thinking to have this applied to
himself during his trial, a man in America, upon being
convicted for terrorizing his former employer, told
the judge that at 54 he was too old to be sent to
jail, and asked for a public stoning instead. His
one condition was that only those without sin should
be allowed to throw the stones. The judge sentenced
him to 5 years in jail. (Culled from THE WORLD ALMANAC
AND BOOK OF FACTS).
To take a rather philosophical view of it
all: We are all under sentence of death, for life
is a terminal disease, and as Bob Dylan sang: "He
not busy being born is busy dying". To ponder
on this might help us understand the importance of
living responsibly. I said above that we are all capable
of killing, and of many other things, but most of
us restrain ourselves, and it is herein that our morality
lies: by not doing things that we may sometimes feel
inclined to do, or by doing other things that we might
not like to do. It is important to know why we restrain
ourselves so. Is it because we fear retribution or
being found out? Is it because we hope for some reward
for not doing what we might otherwise do? Is it because
we want recognition and praise from others? Or is
it because we look on others as ourselves and identify
with them, so that we would try not to inflict upon
them what we ourselves do not like? Since most of
us have not reached the stage of motiveless morality
yet, it is useful to examine our motives for our doings
and not-doings.
And as for judging others, how can we not
do that? We all have standards for many things, and
measure people and things by these standards. To say
that someone or something is ‘good’, ‘bad’,
‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘nice’,
‘nasty’, ‘greedy’, ‘fat’,
‘thin’, ‘big’, ‘small’,
‘short’, ‘tall’, ‘wise’,
‘ignorant’, ‘intelligent’,
‘stupid’, etc., is to pass a judgment
or express an opinion. Comparisons like ‘cheap’,
‘expensive’, ‘shoddy’, ‘good
value’, ‘economical’, etc.—which
we make when we go shopping—are also judgments,
as are opinions of the weather: "Nice day, isn’t
it?", "Terrible weather today", etc.
And when we say that someone is polite or ill-mannered
what is it but a judgment? Concepts of good and bad,
justice, honesty, fair-play, brutality, callousness,
indifference, generosity, stinginess, and so on, are
all judgments, are they not? However can we live without
judging and assessing? While cooking we must judge;
while driving we must judge; while working we must
judge and discriminate. Judgment forms a vital part
of our lives, and we would not be able to function
without it. So, are not people talking nonsense when
they say we shouldn’t judge? Perhaps they are
unclear about the difference between judging and prejudice,
which is unwise judgment, or judgment based upon insufficient
evidence or without being in full possession of the
facts. Judgment based upon the egoistic feeling of
superiority, of feeling better than others, is also
wrong.
Footnote: Some years ago, I wrote the following
letter to a newspaper in Malaysia; it was published,
and received some favorable comments:
"In medieval Europe, criminals who
were caught were placed in the stocks in the marketplace
in full view of the public. A sign stating their offence
would be displayed so that people would know what
they had done and treat them accordingly, with abuse,
scorn, ridicule—and often with over-ripe fruit
and rotten eggs.
"Such treatment surely had a great
psychological effect on the offenders—and on
the bystanders—for who enjoys being publicly
humiliated and embarrassed? Many offenders, one feels,
would prefer a thrashing with a cane than to be put
on display in public.
"Stocks can be easily and cheaply erected,
with a roof to protect the offender from the sun and
rain. An officer of the law could be stationed nearby
to prevent undue violence on the part of the public
to the offender, who would be made to stand or sit
there and review the folly of his misdeeds and perhaps
resolve not to repeat his mistakes.
"Is this kind of psychological deterrent
against crime not worth a try? It might have a great
effect on some would-be law-breakers (and we are all
potential law-breakers in the sense that we have the
capacity, and sometimes the inclination, to break
the law). With crime on the increase, all preventative
measures should be considered". |